Abstract: Software development involves the use of many models
and Eclipse provides an ideal infrastructure for building tools
to support the use of models. While there is a large selection of
tools available for working with individual models, there is less
support for working with collections of models, as for example,
when a collection of models from different sources must be
merged. We have identified the problem of working with
collections of related models in software development as the
Software Model Management (SMM) problem - a close cousin of the
Model Management problem in the area of metadata management. In
the course of building SMM tools to address particular scenarios,
we have observed that they share common foundations both at the
theoretical and implementation levels. In this paper, we describe
the vision and initial development of a framework that implements
these common foundations in order to facilitate and accelerate
the development of Eclipse-based SMM tools.